Word: suburbias
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...Already much of the work is out of its yellow starting boxes - one intriguingly marked mug pop - and seven years after the artist's death, the betting is that his retrospective, "Howard Arkley," will be a winner. Arkley's 25-year career connected comic strips and Conceptualism, Surrealism and suburbia, punk rock and Postmodernism - all with the zip of his airbrush, blurring the line between rarefied art and popular taste in the process. He was able to do this by painting the world most Australians know. In the final rooms of the exhibition - among canvases the size of billboards that...
...senior lecturer in art and design at Monash University, Gregory also happens to be the brother-in-law of Arkley's widow, Alison Burton, and Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley (Cambridge University Press; 214 pages) benefits from intimate access to the artist's studio archive. Here, an entry gleaned from one of his student notebooks - "I offer the following as an example of my state of mind... hint: there could be something that at first seems false. but things are never what they seem" - could be a useful guide for visitors to the retrospective, which opens this...
...this way, his vaudevillean scenes of suburbia are the ultimate self-portraits, their bright exteriors hinting at shadowy, unknowable lives that the viewer can only guess at. In Arkley's case it was a long-term heroin addiction, which finally claimed his life. But his surviving work asks us to leave our final judgment open, which is what distinguishes him from that more cynical chronicler of the everyday, John Brack. Instead, we are left with a glimmer of mirth, irony perhaps, but not least of all affection for what takes place behind the masquerade of suburban life...
They rented a grassy lot for their trailer home at the Lazy Days RV Campground, near a dog track in Hitchcock, Texas. Rusty had no intention of returning to the house in suburbia. Not yet. They were living out a new family motto: Travel light. "We had expenses. We didn't have a budget," Rusty says. "We just kind of lived. We took it easy...
...figure in all Suburbia, the thread that weaves between family and community?the keeper of the suburban dream?is the suburban housewife. In the absence of her commuting, city-working husband, she is first of all the manager of home and brood, and beyond that a sort of aproned activist with a penchant for keeping the neighborhood and community kettle whistling ... If she is not pregnant, she wonders if she is. She takes her peanut-butter sandwich lunch while standing, thinks she looks a fright, watches her weight (periodically), jabbers over the short-distance telephone with the next-door neighbor...